What is the point of a car crusher? It seems to me that a “normal” car ought to be stripped down, probably by a human, such that the interior bits are to be looked at by specilists. Meanwhile the exterior may be melted down - but if it’s in that kind of state it’s WAY beyond what you usually see going into a car crusher.
Furthermore you see so many of these car cushings getting the entire car, not just the interior but stuff like the exterior brake etc components, hell even the tyres if they’re practically brand new. Seems a waste to moi.
You can stack 10 scrap cars in a space that would usually have one or two. It’s space efficiency. A car crusher isn’t at the actual recycler, it’s at the scrapyard, and unflattened cars will bulk out a transport before they weight it out.
It looks like he’s actually asking why they seem to be crushing cars with useful parts still attached, rather than just why they’re crushing cars.
It might be that the parts aren’t worth the time, manpower, storage, transport, whatever, to salvage at this point, particularly if it’s been sitting out in a junk yard for a few years waiting for shade-tree mechanics to stop by and pull a door off of it.
Junkyards specializing in late-model or some imports with higher parts demand will do just what you’re envisioning-- they’ll strip the car down of all the valuable parts which get warehoused and inventoried and only afterwards does the shell go to the crusher/shredder.
But with most, the parts aren’t valuable enough to be worth spending that much time on it, so the cars just sit in the yard and parts get pulled as needed. Eventually someone goes around and decides a certain car is too picked over or that they’ve got more Ford Tauruses than anyone would ever possibly need parts for and they get sent to the crusher.
After they crush it, does it go to a landfill?
Or can it somehow be recycled?
After it’s been compressed you have a compact mixture of several types of metals, plastics, glass, and chemicals. Can the mixture all get thrown into a smelter and have something useful come out of it? Or is there a process for separating out the component materials? Or does it all just have to be buried in a landfill somewhere?
As has been stated above. They don’t crush the whole car, just the frame and what’s left of the body. It’s going to be mostly steel at that point, probably some aluminum or iron, a little bit of copper and few pieces of plastic that’ll burn off when it gets melted down.
All those cubes get sent off to the recycler, they get melted down in a giant pot and the mixture gets tested and adjusted to whatever alloy the buyer wants it to be.
If there’s any glass that they didn’t pull out, I’d imagine most of it gets broken and lands on the crusher floor. The rest will burn up when the metal gets melted.
Crushed cars most definitely DO NOT ever end up in landfills. Automobiles in general have always been one of the most recycled bits of the modern world. There’s always been a demand so it’s always been profitable. A car that goes straight to the crusher will be a very old model (or one that arrived at the yard mangled beyond recognition). So old that there simply won’t be any demand for any of it’s now very outdated parts, so it’s value is only as scrap metal. Usually the engines will be removed first (just kind of ripped out with a forklift or front-end loader) simply because the engine blocks won’t compress much and they can be piled up and shipped & recycled separately. The compressed cubes of cars are just melted down back into steel, all the plastics & fabric parts essentially just burn up in the process. The rubber tires are always removed before crushing and recycled separately too.
Homer Simpson taking Smithers place assisting Mr Burns -
Homer, “Mr Burns, you have some messages. You have ten minutes to move your car, you have five minutes, your car has been crushed into a cube, you have ten minutes to move your cube”
Not necessarily. Only potentially valuable parts get stripped off before the car is crushed. Stuff like the upholstery, plastic interior parts and glass are usually still there. Very low parts demand cars usually get crushed and sent off to the recycler essentially intact.
I’m not entirely sure what happens then, but my understanding is that these days they’ll usually run it through a car shredder (you tube search for cool videos) and then sort the confetti into the various recyclable bits instead of the just melting the whole thing down.
Yeah, I don’t imagine there’s a huge market for, let’s say, 10 year old Taurus engine blocks and steering wheels. You can keep a few of the more pristine examples around to feed that demand and crush 90% of the rest. It’s probably cheaper to skim the crud off the vat of Tauruses (Tuari?) than to disassemble it all manually.
Not sure what the technology is to separate out say, copper and aluminum from iron, but I imagine there is a technique.
As has been said, junking cars is a big business now-late model cars are parted out, and the engines, transmissions, etc., are stored on racks. The body parts are kept (on newer cars) but the older ones are crushed and sold off to metal recyclers. A modern car has a lot of valuable materials (copper is $3.00/lb, aluminum about $2.00. You don’t see many old style junkyards anymore-with decades old wrecks sitting around-the materials are worth too much.
There is such a metal sorting technique. After the car is shredded, you end up with lots of little fragments. You sort them based on whether they are magnetic, pulling out all of the iron and steel. I think that can be pretty much melted down into new steel ingots. IIRC there are techniques that separate aluminum and copper by inducing magnetic eddy currents. I’m not sure if there are methods to separate different sorts of non-ferrous metals, but I’d imagine that the amount of copper in a car is relatively trivial (especially since the alternator and a lot of wiring would be pulled out with the engine). So you might be able to melt down all non-ferrous metals and end up with a mostly pure aluminum ingot.
Most all of the plastics would be left behind in the sorting process. Residual bits would probably be dissolved in the cleaning process.
Missed edit: I found a video that explains the shredding and sorting process. It’s an advertisement for a company that makes the machinery, but it has some pretty clear videos and explanations.
I recently needed a passenger side rear view mirror for my 09 Jeep Patriot. From the dealership, it was a coupla hundred (installed). Searching junkyards, I found one for $75. I was able to find a brand new one for $50, which I purchased and installed myself.
Here’s the whole story: my post is my cite
Some cars first go to a U-Pull yard, where the public, for a fee, can take off parts. After a pre-set period of time, and regardless of what parts are stripped, the car goes to a shredder. Many cars go straight to a shredder, without the U-Pull station in between. Crushing the car is done to facilitate the transportation to the shredder, and also to improve the infeed efficiency of the shredder. The shredder uses a set of rotating hammers inside a grated enclosure. The car (or washing machine etc) gets hammered to bits small enough to fit through these grates - typically about fist-size. This is a process that is remarkably efficient in seperating different materials, though some pieces will be a mix. The fist-size pieces will go through a seperation system by weight: either using water or air to take out the lightest pieces. These will generally be insulation, seat padding or plastic bits. Since there may be some non-ferrous metal in this stream, often it is run through an eddy current system. The debris is landfilled.
The heavier stream goes through a magnetic seperating system. The magnetic stream will be sent to steel mills, and will become new rebar, or beam etc… The non-magnetic stream gets hand-picked for copper and electric motors (and coins). The remainder goes through eddy currents, where white metals (aluminum etc) are seperated out. The rest is landfilled.
The percentage of the car that becomes a usable resource (steel, copper, aluminum, stainless) is dependent of the makeup of the car, but is typically large: >80% by weight. Nowadays, before shredding, all mercury switches must be removed by hand. Most shredders also mandate removal of gas tanks, many mandate removal of tires. Other items that are almost always stripped before shredding (not by law or rules of the shredder, but because of market forces) are catalytic convertors (because of the platinum), lead wheel weights, and jacks - I have no idea where all the jacks go.
My first car was a Model A Ford (had a couple - drove a '29 in college)
One’s first car should be 20 years older than the person.
Anyway, I saw a magazine article about car recycling <i>in the 1930’s</i> - it mentioned that the gas tanks were removed because of the alloy used for them was much more expensive than the common grades of steel used it the rest. These were cars which, if run into a tree a 5-10 mph would bounce off - the bumpers were spring steel. At least on the Fords.
Seeing all those cars lined up to be destroyed was incredible depressing - any one of them would have been worth at least the price of a new Mustang - all those makes that didn’t survive the Depression being turned into yet more Chevys, Dodges, Fords. Pity
You would be wrong, the salvage business is much more profitable than most realize. While a 10 year old Taurus is probably near the bottom of the demand spectrum, they are not only still in demand, they will become more in demand over time.
